path to a directory as argparse argument

Question

I want to accept a directory path as user input in an add_argument() of ArgumentParser().

So far, I have written this:

import argparse  parser = argparse.ArgumentParser() parser.add_argument('path', option = os.chdir(input("paste here path to biog.txt file:")), help= 'paste path to biog.txt file') 

What would be the ideal solution to this problem?

Answer 1

One can ensure the path is a valid directory with something like:

import argparse, os  def dir_path(string):     if os.path.isdir(string):         return string     else:         raise NotADirectoryError(string)  parser = argparse.ArgumentParser() parser.add_argument('--path', type=dir_path)  # ... 

Check is possible for files using os.path.isfile() instead, or any of the two using os.path.exists().